Lady Hale has been a strong advocate of improving diversity within the judiciary.
Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA

The UK’s supreme court should be “ashamed” if it does not radically improve its diversity in the next round of judicial appointments, according to its only female judge, Lady Hale.

Over the past decade all justices selected to sit on the UK’s highest court have been male, white and predominantly privately educated, she told an audience at Birmingham University on Friday.

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Hale’s forthright speech may be read as a deliberate rebuke to remarks from her fellow supreme court justice Lord Sumption, who claimed that any attempt to speed up the process of achieving gender equality in the senior judiciary could lead to “appalling consequences”.

His suggestion that it may take 50 years to achieve gender equality in the senior judiciary prompted a furore within the legal profession and allegations of sexism. Sumption stressed that he wanted to see proper gender balance within the judiciary but said many female lawyers were reluctant to climb the career ladder because of the long hours and poor working conditions.

Hale, 70, is the only woman on the 12-strong supreme court bench. She has been a strong advocate of improving diversity and has even questioned whether an element of positive discrimination may eventually be needed to redress gender imbalance.

“I was sworn in as a lord of appeal in ordinary [a law lord] on 12 January 2004,” she said in her speech on updating the appointments procedure for the supreme court.

Fifteen people have been sworn in as law lords or supreme court justices since then, she said. “Even if we leave out the two [men] who were sworn in the day after me, the court has more than replaced itself since then.

“One might have hoped that the opportunity would have been taken to achieve a more diverse collegium. It has not happened. All of those 13 appointments were men. All were white. All but two went to independent fee-paying schools. All but three went to boys’ boarding schools. All but two went to Oxford or Cambridge. All were successful QCs in private practice, although one was a solicitor rather than a barrister.” Most specialised in commercial, property or planning law.

Hale said she shared with them “the experience of being white and having been to Cambridge” but “in every other of those respects I am different”. She added: “I went to a state day school, my profession was university teacher and then law commissioner, my specialism was family and social welfare law. How is it that, despite their very different characters and outlooks, they remain such a homogenous group?”

Due to retirements, Hale said, “there will inevitably be six vacancies on the supreme court between September 2016 and December 2018. If we do not manage to achieve a much more diverse court in the process of filling them, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.”

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Those responsible for nominating candidates, Hale pointed out, are all white and British. “I believe that anyone who is appointing the justices of the supreme court should be able to look at the body of justices as a whole and ask how they can collectively best serve the needs of the UK justice system,” she said.

“Excellence is important, though I am embarrassed to claim it. But so is diversity of expertise. And so is diversity of background and experience. It really bothers me that there are wome who know or ought to know that they are as good as the men around them, but who won’t apply for fear of being thought to be appointed just because they are a woman.

“We early women believed that we were as good as the men and would certainly not be put off in this way. I may well have been appointed because the powers that be realised the need for a woman.

We owe it to our sex, but also to the future of the law and the legal system, to step up to the plate

Lady Hale

“I am completely unembarrassed about that, because they were right, and I hope that I have justified their confidence in me. I don’t think that all the talk about the best women being deterred is a plot to put them off, but I am sure that they should not be deterred by talk such as this. We owe it to our sex, but also to the future of the law and the legal system, to step up to the plate.”

Hale suggested that an unofficial search committee could be created, responsible for keeping an eye open for potential future candidates and providing appropriate experience and encouragement.

Greater use should be made by the Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) of the “tipping point” or equal merits provision in appointing the senior judiciary outside the supreme court.

The regulation under the Equality Act 2010 allows selection panels considering two candidates of equal merit to choose the one from the less well represented background. Hale said the JAC should use the provision at the beginning of the selection process rather than leaving it to the final stage.